I have a fun one for you today. You probably saw Sen. Rand Paul’s claim that “haters” were conspiring to expose plagiarism in his work, and he vowed to take corrective action by requiring his staff to provide better footnotes and citations in material they provide for work published in his name. In the wake of Sen. Paul’s plagiarism scandal, I was inspired to go back to finally investigate a case of century-long copying that has baffled me until this week, when I finally stumbled across the original source.

I’ve previously noted that skeptics have more or less given ancient astronaut theorists a free pass on quotations from the Mahabharata because the ancient Sanskrit epic is simply too long to search through at 1.8 million words to find the source of ancient astronaut theorists’ unsourced excerpts. I have documented how David Childress and the authors of Morning of the Magicians used that to their advantage to invent a nuclear incident in the epic. Today I’m going to reveal the origins of a century-old claim that the Sanskrit text contains an accurate description of an aerial bomber airplane. First, let’s look at the claim as it is stated today. Here is how David Childress quotes the Mahabharata in 2000’s Technology of the Gods (and Lost Cities of China, and his other self-plagiarized books), calling one vimana an “aerial chariot with the sides of iron and clad with wings” (p. 167). Ellen Lloyd lifts the same quote for Voices from Legendary Times (2005), and Raymond Bernard in The Hollow Earth (1996). More recently, Teodor Gerasim lifts Childress’s prose, including this quotation, for Atlantis-Lemuria and the Modern Connection (2008). And of course the quotation can be found across the internet. Not one gives a citation to the parva or section of the Mahabharata where this text allegedly appears, but all assert that this is a clear description of a modern airplane or spaceship, with metal fuselage and wings. So far, so crappy. So where did David Childress lift it from? That’s easy: He got it out of early twentieth century books about flight that used the alleged passage from the Mahabharata to illustrate mythic prefiguring of flight. Both E. Charles Vivian’s A History of Aeronautics (1921) and Charles Cyril Turner’s Aircraft of To-Day (1917), as well as the 1915 journal of Aeronautics give a fuller quotation which Childress has excerpted and partly mangled:

Krishna’s enemies sought the aid of the demons, who built an aerial chariot with sides of iron and clad with wings. The chariot was driven through the sky till it stood over Dwarakha, where Krishna’s followers dwelt, and from there it hurled down upon the city missiles that destroyed everything on which they fell.

Note the lack of a “the” before “sides.” That’s apparently Childress’s mistake (I can’t find it before him) and a tell-tale sign that a later author is copying from Childress. Now from here things get weird. Vivian’s and Turner’s manuals became convenient sources for later writers on flight, and down to the 1960s we find dozens of mainstream books and manuals repeating the alleged Mahabharata quotation from these sources. Among them are The Annual Reports of the Indiana Engineering Society (1918), Douglas J. Ingells’s They Tamed the Sky (1947), Walter T. Bonney’s The Heritage of Kitty Hawk (1962), as well as dozens of journal articles, including some from the U.S. military’s publication divisions. Then, with the advent of UFO culture and ancient astronauts, all this mainstream copying stops. Suddenly it’s no longer acceptable to point to ancient ideas about aircraft, as though it would be seen as a tacit endorsement of UFOs. So why does all this start right around 1915? The Mahabharata had been rendered into English in 1883-1896, so theoretically we ought to see some reference to this winged iron chariot even before the invention of the airplane. Oh, right. It’s not there. The lines don’t sound much like the real epic, which is long-winded, poetic, and never states anything in a single, direct sentence. The actual source is not the Mahabharata but, so far as I have been able to determine, a 1909 novel by Sarath Kumar Ghosh called The Prince of Destiny. In chapter five, Viswa-mitra explains how India prefigured modern Western science in its ancient epics, which miraculously reveal knowledge of the wonders of the early twentieth century. Ghosh makes Viswa-mitra assert that the Mahabharata reads thus:

Krishna’s enemies sought the aid of the demons, who built an aerial chariot with sides of iron and clad with wings (that is aeroplanes). The chariot was driven through the sky till it stood over Dwarakha, where Krishna’s followers dwelt, and from there it hurled down upon the city missiles that destroyed everything on which they fell…

Ghosh also makes Viswa-mitra claim that other Hindu texts anticipate the (then-current) theory of how the earth formed and the “modern European theory of Evolution.” Note that Ghosh explicitly identifies the iron chariot as an airplane and places ellipses at the end of the last line, both parts of the quotation non-fiction writers immediately dropped, assuming them to be authorial interpolations in a genuine text. The trouble seems to come from the publisher’s preface, which told readers that the novel was more than a mere romance. Instead, it was a “storehouse of Indian information which could not be obtained from any other source.” Ghosh uses the same words just before the alleged Mahabharata quote, calling the Sanskrit epic a “wonderful storehouse of knowledge.” This seems to have given writers of the 1910s the idea that it was an accurate source for material from the Mahabharata. Instead, Viswa-mitra is presenting a romantic and romanticized view of India as a font of modern civilization, something that plays into Ghosh’s political views but which also distorts the material to the advantage of Indian claims to prehistoric scientific supremacy. The actual text of the Mahabharata is quite different than Viswa-mitra’s (or Ghosh’s?) idea of it. The incident in question seems to be one that occurs in book 3, section 17, when the enemies of Krishna gather at Dwarakha to besiege the city with an army of monkeys and elephants. The lead enemy, the demon Salwa, is goaded into single battle with a hero from within the city walls, something like Achilles taking on Hector:

O hero, mounting on his beautiful car decked with gold and furnished with flags and flag-staffs and quivers, the illustrious and mighty Salwa began to discharge his arrows at Pradyumna! Pradyumna also by the energy of his arms, overwhelmed Salwa in the combat by a thick shower of arrows. The king of Saubha, however, thus attacked in battle by Pradyumna, endured him not, but discharged at my son arrows that were like blazing fire. But the mighty Pradyumna parried off that arrowy shower. Beholding this, Salwa rained on my son other weapons of blazing splendour. (Ganguli translation)

In a related passage, some of the arrows used in the broader battle were capable of eviscerating whomever they struck. Thereafter, Krishna hunts down and kills Salwa after the exchange of many blows from supernatural weapons and the death of many demons. As you can see, the original passage bears nothing more than a superficial resemblance to the novel version (Ghosh probably conflates it with the flying car of doom from another passage); in Hindu myth, incidentally, Dwaraka was destroyed by flood, not by bombs, and recently remains of a city believed to be it were found under the Arabian Sea, sunk by an earthquake. There is no iron chariot with wings that drops bombs; there are only flying chariots, mostly pulled by flying horses. Amazing, though, that lines from a novel became accepted as fact and repeated for a century as accurate—and no one ever thought to check the Mahabharata!

You would think that the reference to "missiles" would have least made someone check the translation. Yes, missiles can be a generic term for arrows too, but if I were repeating that passage I'd want to check what the best translation of the original said.

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titus pullo

11/6/2013 08:05:43 am

Senator Paul cited primary sources...he didn't cite secondary..which honestly I wrote up scientific papers 25 years ago and I didn't either..and for gosh sakes we are talking about politicans..Biden actually quoted word for word from Neil Kinnock and Obama seems to tell tall stories all the time (Reagan did as well)..not a scandel here but a hit job by the statists..please stay out of politics..or else this wonderful site will just become a screaming ground of progressives versus libertarians..

The existence of a plagiarism scandal isn't a political statement; Paul admitted it and it exists, regardless of your political stripes. I offered no opinion on the matter but merely acknowledged its existence, which I'm not sure you can really doubt. The existence of this scandal reminded me of ancient astronaut writers' trouble with sources, which is what prompted me to start looking at one question that had bothered me.

Paul copied word-for-word from sources without using quotation marks, which gets students kicked out of college. It doesn't matter whether you are progressive, libertarian, or whatever, using other people's exact words without attribution and quotation marks is stealing.

Before you get all worked up about politics, remember that last year I criticized Sen. Harry Reid and Pres. Obama for their advocacy of a UFO museum. http://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2012/09/us-government-designated-museum-promotes-ufo-myths.html

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Mandalore

11/6/2013 08:32:40 am

Taking someone else's ideas and publishing them under one's own name without citing them is plagiarism, plain and simple. Especially when its word for word. To be sure, Paul's enemies are pouncing on this incident but that doesn't change the fact that he (or his unchecked aides) still did it. And I certainly wouldn't be surprised that other politicians do the same. It is a testament to poor teaching of critical thinking skills and proper research techniques, which allows people like AATs to endlessly repeat citations for nonexistent passages of obscure texts and politicians to skew history for their own ends. Party affiliations are irrelevant.

By the way, I am impressed by the research that Jason did to show the fascinating roots of these iron chariots. Historiography is often entertaining as ideas are passed down through writers, at least to me. I especially liked how he quoted things and then cited them. A rare talent indeed.

The dirty secret is that most politicians and public figures write just about none of their own work. Books get published under their names and we all pretend that they wrote them even though they may never have even read them. I have personally worked as a ghostwriter for government materials, including a speech given by a third world official at the U.N. this year and several reports issued by a foreign government. Since no one pretends that official statements are the work of individual giving voice to them, this isn't an ethical problem.

It's not limited to politicians. I am also the uncredited rewrite artist on a history text published in Britain a couple of years ago, and I've rewritten several academic journal articles published by international scholars for whom English is not a strong point. I've had to gently "correct" the use of sources more than once to conform to Western understandings of plagiarism. Here, though, I was working with actual text created by others, not inventing material for them to publish under their own names.

It's also a fact that many academics use uncredited assistance from graduate students to research and draft articles, chapters, and even whole books. Heck, James Patterson has turned partial authorship into an industry with his novel factory farm where he comes up with a short outline and somehow his assistants make a book appear. When it comes down to it, the concept of "authorship" is increasingly nebulous, and this can only contribute to the idea that anyone's words are fair game for recycling and reuse.

Mandalore

11/6/2013 09:33:31 am

Blatant plagiarism is how ancient writers used to do it. Diodorus Siculus is the usual scapegoat as an example of an ancient historian who simply cut and pasted previous Greek writers. But all of the ancient historians had no compunctions about simply taking ideas or whole sections of other people's works.

Perhaps we are simply returning to the good old days when plagiarism was the norm and it was cool to just make sh*t up. (I'm looking at you Scriptores Historiae Augustae.) I suppose AATs and politicians are simply part of a proud tradition that stretches back millennia.

Shane Sullivan

11/6/2013 11:57:15 am

I can't help but notice that not only does the paragraph from the Mahabharata not seem to describe a modern airplane, it doesn't mention flight at all, even by flying-horse power. I wanted to know the context of the excerpt, so I read page you cited; from the link you provide:

"And with his steeds, more flying than running on the ground, he rushed against the foe..."

Sounds like a fancy way of saying they were moving gracefully and quickly, not that they were 'kittyhawking.' Even if we assume that the author is being literal, at most, this is the speeder-bike scene from Return of the Jedi, not the climax of Independence Day.

To be fair, that's just my best guess at the original passage Ghosh was aiming for based on the story of the demons attacking Krishna's city. It seems that he was purposely conflating bits and pieces from across the epic. I think that the flying car part comes from Shiva's flying chariot, which sends missiles of death down onto the triple city in Karna Parva, sec. 34.

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Shane Sullivan

11/6/2013 02:44:13 pm

Actually, I can't find anything about flight in that section, either. The phrase "ascend the car" turns up alot, but, of course, that simply refers to climbing aboard the chariot, not flying.

And again, "Brahman urged those steeds endued with the fleetness of the wind or thought towards that spot where the triple city, O king, stood," indicates that those are some pretty fast horses, but not necessarily that they fly.

O' course, I can't read Sanskrit, so I can only go by that translation. Still the greatest work of science fiction ever written.

Thane

11/6/2013 01:39:09 pm

you know, not only do AAT's don't think early peoples and those of cultures less advanced than Western Civilizations couldn't stack two stones without assistance from more advanced civilizations, they also don't think they had any imagination either.

Sometimes stories are embellished over time to make them more exciting and entertaining. Flying Chariots are way cool ....just like superheros and sci-fi stories have cool crafts.

just saying....

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Shane Sullivan

11/6/2013 02:24:53 pm

Speaking of the Mahabharata vis-a-vis sci-fi stories, have you heard of the Grant Morrison project 18 Days? Some of the art released for it in a book of the same name is nothing short of stunning. So stunning, in fact, that I was underwhelmed by the flash-cartoonishness of the youtube release of the series.

Well, I still have images of dinosaurs and airships in my head. Grant Morrison and youtube can't take that away from me.

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Thane

11/7/2013 12:16:34 pm

Thanks, Shane. I'll have to look for the art.

Clint Knapp

11/6/2013 03:59:33 pm

This has always been my biggest bone of contention too. These people take everything that suits them literally, so they project their own literalism onto everything they see and read. It is wholly unfathomable to the average AA muppet to believe that ancient man had all the same faculties we have today.

They grew bored, they made up stories, they drew fanciful things and did what they could to take their minds off of the daily grind like anyone living today. The differences between people living today and five thousand years ago are minimal at best. We're all Modern Man, we just have five thousand more years of cultural development, discovery, and experience to draw on. Unfortunately, we've also got five thousand more years worth of idiocy built up to draw on.

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Varika

11/7/2013 07:54:03 am

I know, we somehow invented fiction only in the dawn of the 20th century, despite the fact that we have RECORDS of fictional publications spanning back to the Tale of Genji in the early 11th century in Japan. Not to mention, oh, I don't know, AESOP way back the sixth century BCE. (I mean, anybody who actually believes a fox would even WANT grapes, much less engage in human speech about them, should potentially seek admittance to the nearest psychiatric facility.)

Fiction is a valuable tool for education and for sociopolitical statements, too--it's not just entertainment. Look at Swift, Voltaire...look at how much of our classic literature is specifically sociopolitical in nature. The Grapes of Wrath, Crime and Punishment, To Kill A Mockingbird, Farenheit 451--they're all clearly fiction, never been sold as anything else, but they're also strong statements about society as the authors saw it. Even Harry Potter has social issues in it that kids need to learn about and learn to deal with, like bigotry, bullying, and even death.

It was even easier to create fiction in days before copy write law existed, so of COURSE our ancestors used it!

Thane

11/7/2013 12:15:46 pm

Folktales and legendary tales are vehicles to promulgate culture and to reinforce valued behaviors and demonstrate why non-valued behaviors should be avoided (i.e. all the bad that comes to the villains and those that reject the mores and customs of the culture.)

As a storyteller, do you want to face dwindling tips and tokens of appreciation as people get bored of your stories or do you change things up to win new fans and earn more donations?

If you are a youngster, to whom are you going to listen? To your the guy that tells boring stories or the guy that jazzes things up? If it's a cold winter night around the fire, do you want to listen to the same old story you've heard since you were born or to the new take on the old tale?

Even today movies are "rebooted" before the originating generation has passed....and in some cases within a decade of the first showing.

::shrug::it's just common sense to me.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I've always thought that human are essentially the same since the earliest of days, what's changed is our technologies and our philosophies.....but not who we are essentially.

The Other J.

11/6/2013 05:07:59 pm

Hold up here:

An ancient fictional saga from the subcontinent is adapted into a different fictional form thousands of years later, which is then re-adapted and re-written by people from different continents in order to re-interpret the story and show how it actually re-tells a different history of the world, one where UFO's play a significant role. And with the publication of said re-re-adapterpretations, actual people in the real world that we live in begin to report encountering said UFO's in said real world on a much more frequent basis. Fiction imposes itself onto reality and seems to manifest.

That's Jorge Luis Borges. That's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

For the uninitiated: The story is a hybrid fictional tale written like an essay/personal account of Borges himself, although it's a fictional version of him in the story. The short version is he and some of his friends come across a fragment from an encyclopedia describing a land called Uqbar that once existed in Mesopotamia. The more Borges and his colleagues look into this mysterious text, the more they learn of a cabal of intellectuals who are attempting to create a history of a planet, Tlön, by seeding the world with articles like the one on Uqbar, a land of Tlön. The cabal is funded by a millionaire from Memphis, Tennessee, who wants to create a full set of encyclopedias about Tlön. But as more texts about Tlön begin appearing in the real world, the real world begins to increasingly mirror Tlön, in effect becoming Tlön -- Tlön eventually begins to take the place of Earth while the Earth the Borges and his colleagues once knew disappears.

I'm not saying the Earth we know will disappear the more Childress plagiarizes himself and the more Ancient Aliens airs, but I am saying it's an example of fiction imposing itself onto and shaping reality in a way that was prefigured by Borges in his story. And goddamit that's weird.

A similar version a professor once told me, but I can't recall all the details of: There was a ficitonal writer from either Hungary or Romania who was only written about by other writers -- it had become a kind of running gag. But then fragments of texts that were recovered in archives began to be attributed to this fictional person, and now he has a physical history in the real world, even though he didn't exist. Same sort of thing.

...axaxaxas mlö...

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Shane Sullivan

11/7/2013 04:49:26 am

Do you want to know what's REALLY weird? The first alien abduction ever reported--the Betty and Barney Hill incident--occurred five months after the publication of the first English translation of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

Definitely a self-fulfilling prophecy orchestrated by the Super-Illuminati, a group so secret that the regular Illuminati doesn't even know about it!

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Varika

11/7/2013 08:01:38 am

This actually reminds me of something that David Eddings wrote, I believe in the volume published as "The Rivan Codex." He said that he'd received too many letters from fans talking about how they actually BELIEVED in his prophecies that he refused to write out the entire "Mrin Codex" from the book unless his publisher promised to print it as a parchment scroll. It also reminds me that Mercedes Lackey has ceased entirely to work on books in a promising series (the Diana Tregarde books) because she had too many people emailing her about how they were REAL and she HAD to give them more information and they NEEDED to get in touch with a Guardian, to the point where it actually had her really and truly upset and harassed. (http://ftp.pwp.att.net/m/e/megant3/abml/laststraw.html for an archived copy of her essay on the subject.)

Fiction is powerful stuff.

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Only Me

11/7/2013 11:01:29 am

I think, in your examples, the need to disassociate from a reality deemed too unsatisfactory to be "powerful stuff". I experienced much the same as Eddings and Lackey in regards to Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, when a co-worker insisted that it was based on historical fact....because of the claim written in the forward by Brown. It took some time, but I was able to show him that the novel was entirely a work of fiction.

It seems that the imagination that we used so much as children, becomes perverted in adulthood, when many prefer the "real truth" behind conspiracies or the inclusion into a select few that have access to "special knowledge", promised by alternative history, over reality. Perhaps it's a desire to overcome the dissatisfaction they feel?

Varika

11/7/2013 12:09:14 pm

Only Me, isn't fiction all about "disassociating from reality?" The biggest difference is that some people do that while they read the book, enjoy it, and understand that that's what it is, while others seem to have difficulty with that last part.

I will say that a major difference between Eddings and Lackey and the Dan Brown situation is that Dan Brown was shamelessly capitalizing on belief with that statement at the beginning. Eddings and Lackey never made the slightest pretense that any of there stuff was even BASED on reality--Lackey's closest was street names in a couple of cities, while Eddings didn't even have the same PLANETS in mind.

I suspect you're right that it stems at least partly from dissatisfaction. Particularly for people who prefer their fantasy worlds even when they are PROVABLY false. I'm not sure that I consider this "perversion" of imagination, though. I tend to consider it more...misapplication. The same process--"I don't like reality as it is, so I will imagine a better one"--is also responsible for things like significant sociopolitical advances, any number of inventions, and, of course, pretty much the entire entertainment industry. If you can't imagine it, you don't go out there and try to do it, after all.

The trick is to actually tell where reality stops and imagination begins, and THAT is something I don't know how to correct.

Let's not forget that Theosophists read Bulwer-Lytton's "The Coming Race" and so wanted Vril to be real that Helena Blavatsky invented the doctrine that sci-fi writers were pulling truth from the spirit realm unconsciously so that most fiction was, in fact, supernaturally true.

Thane

11/7/2013 12:20:00 pm

As someone who has gamed online playing a character, I can attest that many people have difficultly telling the difference between reality and fiction. They start to think that the character you play is really who you are reality.

Humans have a great capacity for self-delusion.

Shane Sullivan

11/7/2013 05:54:45 pm

Another fine, if obvious, example of this sort of phenomenon is Atlantis. Imagine if Plato were alive in 1882- er, and that he could read English. He'd have taken one look at Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and jumped off a bridge, shouting, "allegoryyyy" on the way down.

The Other J.

11/7/2013 07:41:36 pm

Heh. Plato might have jumped, but I bet he'd have done it metaphorically.

Besides, he was a tough bugger; he'd probably outlast the fall, real or metaphorical. Fun Fact: The name "Plato" meant wide and flat, and he got that name from his wrestling stance, because he was an awesome wrestler. I don't know what the Greek would be for "low, split-legged and three-point," but that'd be my Greek philosopher name.

Shane Sullivan

11/8/2013 04:08:09 am

I hope I'm not derailing the discussion, but...

Other J, I wasn't aware that that was the origin of his name, but I'd heard that Plato wrestled; His insight into grappling caused him to (allegedly) criticize the usefulness of pankration as training for soldiers. Apparently he felt ground-fighting was to be be avoided in open battle.

(I can now cross martial arts off the "Things I never thought I'd get to talk about on the blog-comments section of jasoncolavito.com" list!)

The Other J.

11/8/2013 05:54:38 am

Oh man, yeah this could get derailed fast. I've contemplated a book tracking pankration to India with Alexander's soldiers, being adopted and adapted by Indians who then took their version to China (Bodhi Dharma), which eventually seeded into Japan and leads to today's MMA via jujitsu; and the opposite direction from Greece up through the Caucasus and into Europe via wrestling.

Plato probably had a point about ground fighting in his era, when they were more lightly armored. But by the time those techniques arrived in Japan and were adopted by the samurai, they were more necessary; their armor was good enough that if you lost your weapon, you were better off snapping a joint than striking. Even in the 20th century, the Russian military saw enough utility in that to create combat sombo, and the U.S. military has adapted the techniques into their combatives program. In a way, it's almost like a grappling meme.

Shane Sullivan

11/8/2013 11:33:19 am

Other J (OJ?), is there actually any evidence in favor of the theory that pankration migrated to China by way of India? I'm familiar with the idea, but as far as I know, it's never been substantiated.

I mean, obviously the importation of jujitsu to Brazil is well documented, and the initial development of the discipline in Japan from earlier Chinese systems is generally accepted, but I thought the notion that pankration travelled to China by way of India was mostly conjecture. We do know that grappling systems were practiced in China for centuries before Bodhi Dharma's lifetime, which makes it difficult to judge his influence.

Further complicating the issue is the ubiquitousness of grappling in so many cultures, coupled with the fact that human anatomy is pretty much uniform across the globe; it can be hard to judge whether one method of ass-kicking is related to another, or if any similarity is a coincidence born of the limitations of the human body. There are only so many ways to physically manipulate the human frame.

The Other J.

11/8/2013 05:17:09 pm

Shane, you're right, it is just conjecture right now. If I were to do a book about it, I'd have to do some more investigation. India had its own tradition of wrestling, and I'd be interested in finding out what they absorbed from the Greek settlers in India, and if any of that made its way as a system from India to China. The commonalities really become more clear when you compare pankration to Japanese jujitsu.

But you're also right about how the different moves and locks get repeated across cultures, in large part because there's only so many ways a body can go. Ever been to the Madison Zoo? There's an orangutan exhibit there, and if you're ever there when they have young orangutans around, watch them for a while -- the do snap-downs, collar ties, sweep singles, inside singles and blast doubles just like the elementary school kids I used to coach. Must be a primate thing.

I actually wrote a little about wrestling in Beowulf when I was in grad school. When Grendel first reaches for Beowulf and Beowulf grabs him, the text reads "ond wið earm gesæt." Beowulf then somehow manages to rip Grendel's arm off.

A few other scholars had written about the passage, trying to figure out how the move would have worked, and it was clear to me that these other scholars had never wrestled before -- they had no understanding of basic biomechanics and how certain moves worked. So I gave it a crack.

The line is usually translated as something like "and he sat up with the monster's arm," or take Heaney: "the alert hero's comeback and armlock forestalled him utterly." But "wið" can be translated as either 'with' or 'against' -- and if you read it as 'against' and take into account the detailed positioning the poet describes, it sounds like Beowulf is grabbing Grendel's wrist, holding the monster's outstretched arm straight, and sitting against the joint -- and that's a move that can put tremendous pressure against the shoulder joint. Add a little poetic license, and he rips the arm off.

That same year at the NCAA's, an Iowa heavyweight did pretty much the same move to an Iowa State heavyweight in the semi-finals, and tore the Iowa State wrestler's shoulder out of socket. The guy had to injury default the rest of the tournament and get surgery. I was able to grab footage of the move and use it in my presentation -- real evidence of what the poet seemed to be describing in the passage.

I know one other scholar at Oklahoma has written something similar, but he did it a couple years after I wrote my paper, and it's just one of those coincidences. He's one of those guys who took up jujitsu to stay in shape while teaching, and realized that some of the arm locks sounded a lot like what he was teaching. I should show him that NCAA footage someday.

pedantic

11/8/2013 01:05:28 am

I not only agree with the overall point you are making, but t I'm really impressed with the depth of research, something which is sorely lacking in most ancient astronaut literature. How did you find The Prince of Destiny?

The empirical problems you consistently highlight in your blog are also to be found in most conspiracist literature. Fake and fabricated quotations, a failure to go to original sources - even though they are less obscure than is the case in ancient history - and a preference for sensational factoids, abounds.

And like the transmission of Childress' unreliable quote, conspiracy books, especially those in the anti-"new world order" genre, are infected with dodgey sources.

I waded through the Ramayana and some of the Mahabharata to get at this stuff. The famous scene of elephants and men running into a river after a bomb goes off and decontaminating themselves (as slung together from various places by these fiction as fact writers) says nothing of all this, but rather describes a chaotic rout triggered by an elephant who panicked.

However. There are references to flying craft (not airplane like) and weapons that seem NOT nuclear but more likely a vague memory, rewritten in terms the poet could understand of the legends, of DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPONS.

I deal with this in A Possible History of Life on Mars on amazon.com kindle, if you don't have kindle you can download kindle for pc or mac free and read it on your computer.

There is something strange about those days, but it isn't what the airplanes and nuke crowd think it is.

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Christine (Justina) Erikson

11/10/2013 08:19:45 am

I forgot to add, the only river mentioned in that cite is a river of flesh, fat and blood, sounds like exaggerated hyperbole, but such a scene might indicate use of explosives.

Elsewhere, a woman is told she will have 60,000 children, and forwith spawns a foam with jelly blobs in it which become children. Sounds like a warped memory of in vitro fertilization and use of artificial wombs to produce a veritable army.

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